The present invention relates generally to constructing, provisioning and managing server and storage in SAN environment.
Recently, complexity of constructing, provisioning and managing server and storage system is the primary concerns in business enterprises. For example, administrator has to install a server operating system to each server, set up network options, install and set up necessary applications, configure storage area network (SAN), and set up a storage system. Furthermore, the step of storage system set up requires at least configuring logical storage volumes, allocating an internal path to each volumes, setting up security options such as LUN masking, and formatting the volume with appropriate format type.
Server virtualization is increasingly applied in business enterprises due to its ability to consolidate physical servers and improve manageability and utilization ratio of server and storage resources. Server virtualization is a technology that is able to run multiple computing machines virtually on a single physical server. Each virtual machine is stored as a file that is a virtual disk image for each virtual machine. With the server virtualization technology, virtual machines (VMs) can be easily provisioned by distributing copies of master disk image data called “golden image” in which necessary programs or applications are already installed and set up.
However, this VM provisioning method is only concerned with VM image distribution, and cannot be applied for physical server and storage provisioning. Therefore, even with the server virtualization, administrators need to configure and provision physical server and storage system independently.
US2008/0114955 shows a computer system and a method for constructing an access environment to enable access by a host to a logical volume in a storage system, where the user only need to input a designation of logical volume-related condition and the logical volume is allocated to the communication port.
US2008/0082749 show a storage apparatus which uses iSCSI protocol, which makes it possible for each user to configure the necessary setting within the scope of their right without installing software particular to the storage apparatus in each computer, and, in this setting, allocatable capacity of LUs are calculated so that the identified LUs are allocated to the relevant host computers.
Although these technologies provide the solution for the problems of administrating server and storage system in SAN environment, administrators still face a complexity when they configure and manage both server and storage system in the way that they need to install each server and application, and configure storage system every time they introduce or reconfigure a server or application.